Software process improvement often lacks strong links to project management and control activities, which are concerned with identifying the need of process change and triggering improvement initiatives. Project management, on the other hand, often fails at selecting appropriate software engineering methods and technology that help to ensure project success. This paper proposes a model that gui...

Many organizations wish to improve the quality of software they develop, the predictability of developing it, and the productivity of the people developing it. One approach for doing this is to improve software development processes. Most process models identify purely technical approaches to improve software processes and seldom consider organizational or cultural issues. This paper, on the ot...

In this paper we discuss our study of the problems 12 software companies experienced in software development. In total we present qualitative data collected from 45 focus groups that involved over 200 software staff. We look at how different practitioner groups respond to software process improvement problems. We show our classification and analysis of this data using a graphical data represent...

The software business is a fast growing industry sector and lack of quality has a significant consequence for society and economy. However, reports about unfinished development projects, project overruns and system and software failures are still the rule. Software quality management (SQM) standards and software process improvement (SPI) methodologies are all promoted to solve these problems. H...

Welcome to another issue of SPIP. The articles in this issue contain insights and fresh perspectives on the software process and where it is heading. We hear a lot about developers and skills, but not enough about the teams or groups that form the basic development unit we use for software development. Software development is typically done in teams; however SPIP has little to say about how to ...

Abstract – At the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), software process improvement (SPI) is taught in lecture format and with a 10-week implementation project in an organization by teams of students of the graduate software engineering curriculum. The SPI course is taught using a ‘problemgoal-solution’ approach where students learn that any process improvement initiative must be based on iss...

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) was established in 1976 for the purpose of studying and measuring software processes with the intent of identifying improvements that could be applied to the production of ground support software within the Flight Dynamics Division (FDD) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The SEL has three mem...

Ahlgren, Riikka Software patterns, organizational learning and software process improvement Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2011, 70 p. (+ included articles) (Jyväskylä Studies of Computing, ISSN 1456-5390; 129) ISBN 978-951-39-4173-4 Finnish summary Diss. Software process improvement is a necessity in any software organization. This thesis approaches software process improvement from an or...

Studies have shown that nearly two-thirds of all software process improvement (SPI) efforts have failed or at least fell short of expectations. Commitment has been argued to play an important role in determining the outcome of an SPI endeavor. This paper reports preliminary results from a study that attempts to explicate commitment process in SPI. Four SPI efforts were studied in two different ...

A number of differences among quality approaches exist and there can be various situations in which the usage of multiple approaches is required, e.g. to strengthen a particular process with multiple quality approaches or to reach certification of the compliance to a number of standards. First of all it has to be decided which approaches have potential for the organization. In many cases one ap...